A Ukraine Question
My first post was about climate. To make it clear that I am not a one trick pony, this and the next will be on other, indeed unrelated, issues.
Now that Germany is willing to allow other European countries to send Ukraine Leopard tanks, quite a lot of them should be available quite soon. Tanks, however, are of no use without trained crews. Searching online, I find estimates of training time ranging from six weeks to years.
That raises an interesting question to which perhaps some readers can offer an answer.
Several of the countries that have offered to send tanks to Ukraine made the offer some time back, with Poland threatening that if Germany did not give permission to reexport the tanks to Ukraine they would do it anyway. Even if countries required German permission to send the tanks to Ukraine, they surely did not require permission to send Ukrainians to the tanks, to start training tank crews weeks, even months, before they could send the tanks.
Did they?
Hi David! Congrats to your decision to writing a substack (which I know is only an add-on to the other things you wrote and are writing currently).
Concerning the training question, I don't have an answer, only some side-comments: first, Poland, while complaining a lot and very loudly about not being able to send tanks because of the needed German permission didn't in fact formally ask for this permission until last week. I understand, that it might be a normal procedure to first talk about such things among governments, and then follow this up with formalities, but in this case putting out the formal request would have made Poland's loud claims more credible. Why didn't they do it? I can only speculate, and my first guess is that they were in fact as reluctant to be the 'only' one to send those tanks as everybody else. Or more precisely, they explicitely wanted the cover of Germany sending tanks as much as Germany wanted U.S. cover.
On the training question, one of the first things the new German minister of defense said, was 'the Ukrainians can already start to train on the Leopards' (even before the decision by the German government to send tanks).
Finally, what I gathered from expert talks, the most challenging part is not to operate the tanks, it's more to be capable - and have the logistics availabe - to repair the tanks on the spot.
Cheers, and enjoy your Sunday!